Mao and Tigers

1976 Man can conquer nature


I came across this quote from Mao and wonder if this was the seed that gave rise to the notion that people should eliminate tigers from China:

"You are too irritating." We are talking about how to deal with domestic and foreign reactionaries, the imperialists and their running dogs, not about how to deal with anyone else. With regard to such reactionaries, the question of irritating them or not does not arise. Irritated or not irritated, they will remain the same because they are reactionaries. Only if we draw a clear line between reactionaries and revolutionaries, expose the intrigues and plots of the reactionaries, arouse the vigilance and attention of the revolutionary ranks, heighten our will to fight and crush the enemy's arrogance can we isolate the reactionaries, vanquish them or supersede them. We must not show the slightest timidity before a wild beast. We must learn from Wu Sung on the Chingyang Ridge. As Wu Sung saw it, the tiger on Chingyang Ridge was a man-eater, whether irritated or not. Either kill the tiger or be eaten by him -- one or the other. 

Mao Tse-tung, ON THE PEOPLE'S DEMOCRATIC DICTATORSHIP, In Commemoration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Communist Party of China, June 30, 1949

Then, in a letter to his wife, Mao paraphrases an old Chinese proverb: ‘When there is no tiger in the mountain, the monkey is king’

Proverbs and rhetoric apparently came easily and it is unclear how much Mao intended that tigers should be extirpated from China, against the actions of vast numbers of adherents, eager to interpret his words in any way that demonstrates their loyalty.